I enlisted. Nobody forced me; not my parents, friends or other family members. Nobody fooled me or tricked me into it. I was not drafted. I was not talked into it. I’m convinced most people who knew me well thought I wouldn’t last a week! I didn’t grow up in a military family and, as one of Bethel College’s most well known campus peaceniks, I certainly had no military friends. I enlisted. I signed up for it.
But I had no idea what enlistment meant. None! I had no idea what I signed up for.Open your Bibles to the fourth chapter of James (page 1108). As we continue our “listening to leather knees” conversation from James this morning, we come to four enormous verses. James has been very sternly discussing some squabbles among the believers and then, smack dab in the middle of his argument, he shares some absolutely core truth. Just listen…
Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.
James Adamson, one of the world’s most well known and respected scholars on the book of James, translates the first phrase of this verse slightly differently. He says it should read “So enlist under God.” While this translation sounds awkward, Adamson and others make clear that the image of submission here in verse 7 is one of very intentional, proper submission to a deserving leader. This is not passive, weak or powerless stuff – this is a gutsy choice.
But what does a proper enlistment look like? What are we signing up for? Some folks read this passage and others like it and conclude that some yelling drill sergeant relationship with God is exactly what we’re signing up for. Submit, fight, purify, grieve, mourn and wail! On your face, maggot! When I want your opinion, I’ll beat it out of you!
What a terrible view of this passage! What a disgusting, improper view of enlistment!
There is a very important rule in biblical interpretation called “the rule of end stress.” Put simply, this rule argues that the final words or sentence of a Bible passage are very often the most important ones. The final words of a passage often very neatly summarize the most important concern of the passage. I believe our passage is a perfect place to apply this rule.
If we look at just the final words of our passage today, what should we conclude is God’s most important concern? What do you suppose is the ultimate focus of this passage? Isn’t it obvious? I believe it is the deepest desire of God’s heart that each and every single one of us be gloriously lifted up; lifted far, far beyond and above any heavenly height we could ever achieve on our own. To be all we were created by God to be! God wants to rejoice in us! Every single thing Almighty God orders and cajoles us to do is with this goal in mind – breaking the bonds of sin, suffering and shame that bind us and releasing us to soar as we were created and designed to do. As we said a couple weeks ago, ultimately, our enlistment is all about completely depopulating hell; lifting people heavenward both right now and for all eternity.
With these final words in mind as God’s desire for us, all the grimness is taken right out of the rest of the passage. Understanding God’s deepest desire for our exaltation, we can then look at the passage and excitedly discover and embrace His action steps for doing so.
And make no mistake – there is nothing passive about our enlistment. We signed up for action when we signed up to follow Jesus. I suspect this is the first and most important lesson many folks need to take away from this passage. Our enlistment – this following Jesus Christ business is action oriented. There are fully ten imperative commands in these four verses – ten actions steps toward our exaltation. Let’s fly quickly through them…
Submit to God. The first and most important action step on our path to exaltation is an intentional submission to God. There is no way to please God or discover our true selves without first intentionally choosing to submit. And please understand this decision to submit is neither a one-time nor an easy decision. We reaffirm our submission daily, recognizing the full cost this submission decision will bring us. While following Jesus is not about submitting to God as an angry heavenly drill sergeant, there must be no doubt in our mind that submitting might well mean lots of angry, difficult, drill sergeant moments we agree to endure. Just as there are no partial military enlistments or partial pregnancies, there is no partial submission.
Are we fully enlisted in this thing? Are we courageous enough to aggressively submit? Many folks have a hard time submitting to anyone. While our culture adores all its supposed freedoms, independence and all its precious rebels, trust me when I say rebellion is not a step on God’s path to exaltation and joy. If that’s you, then just forget the rest of this message.
Resist the Devil. The second action step is resistance. This is a great one! Do you see the stunning promise here? Resist the devil and he will flee from you. We’re supposed to fight back against evil and we’re supposed to win. This is not a fair fight we’re engaged in! By the power and presence of the Holy Spirit living and moving in our lives, we’re supposed to win. We’re supposed to be scary to Satan, because, as all the t-shirts at the Cornerstone Festival proclaim every year, Jesus already beat the devil with a big ugly stick! We’re supposed to be people whose names are very well known in the pit, because of the Name we carry into the pit.
Are you winning more than you’re losing? Do you believe you’re supposed to win? Or are you even trying to resist the devil as you should? Do you know how? If you don’t, spend some time reading Ephesians 6:10-19 this week; the Apostle Paul was very good at resisting the devil. He can give you all the pointers you need. If we don’t actively fight back against the evil within and without us, we are never going to experience the exaltation God desires for us.
Come Near To God. The third action step is gorgeous. Come near to God and He will come near to you. This is the action step that absolutely murders any idea of God as “angry, screaming drill sergeant.” Never forget God loves you like crazy! As you’re courageously, daily choosing to submit to Him, as you’re fighting off the devil, don’t ever, ever forget Almighty God is always as close to you as you will allow Him to be. I will never leave you nor forsake you! I am the father of the prodigal always waiting at the end of the road for any of my kids to take just one step in my direction! No matter how dark or difficult our day, we have only to turn toward God and He will turn toward us.
But the initiative here is on us. Never forget Jesus allowed the rich, young ruler to sadly walk away. God will always allow us to choose our destiny. While this is a beautifully gracious promise, it is still an action step we must constantly take.
Wash Your Hands. The fourth action step is an allusion to something Old Testament priests were required to do before entering the Temple for prayer; wash their hands. Properly prepare yourselves for the holy service to which you have been called. With the help of the Holy Spirit, start cleaning up those things in your life that might dishonor or devalue the God you’re trying to properly serve. Do nothing to dishonor the Name. As I think again in terms of our military enlistment metaphor, I see James saying, “Soldier, square yourself away! Shine up those boots, starch that uniform, show some respect for the high calling you’ve embraced.”
Purify Your Hearts. But the fifth action step takes this common fourth concern even further. Just as Jesus made clear it is what comes out of us making us unclean and unfit for service, James admonishes his readers not to just clean up all the outward stuff in their lives, but to pay proper attention to the inward junk causing the outward problems. Don’t just wash your hands, purify your hearts! We aren’t interested in just looking good; we long to be good. Commit yourself to brutally purging from your life anything that would continue to pull you in two different directions. There can be no place for two commanders in our enlistment!
There was a funny Glenn McCoy cartoon in the Star Tribune a couple months ago. Isn’t this sort of how a lot of us behave? The sign says wash the hands and we wash our hands, but somehow it just doesn’t occur to us to pay proper attention to everything else in our lives in need of a good scrubbing. Somehow this part of the conversation reminds me of something my dad used to say to me as a little boy on Saturday nights when I was hurrying to get through my Saturday night bath so I could watch Adam 12. He would scrunch up his forehead, shake his head and say, “Don’t just stick your toes in the water, boy, get your whole body in there now and get yourself clean!” If we long to experience the glorious exaltation God desires to give us, we will beg God to help us scrub every corner of our lives clean.
Grieve, Mourn & Wail. But if I have no awareness of how filthy I am, I’m not going to worry that much about getting a proper Saturday night bath, am I? This is where the often misunderstood sixth, seventh and eighth action steps in this passage come in. Some folks have the wildly mistaken impression verse 9 teaches a “gloomy Gus” Christianity. Nothing could be further from the truth! James is not preaching against a joyous, laughing Christian faith. What James is saying here is, “Folks, if you want to experience all God has for you, you must be honest and truthful with yourselves. You must be willing to allow God to constantly hold the mirror of His Word up to your lives and expose all those areas where you fall short.” Would you rather grieve, mourn and wail down here temporarily or would you rather grieve, mourn and wail for all eternity? That is the choice James is offering us. We don’t find joy and happiness as Christians by covering over or ignoring our sin; we find joy and happiness by discovering, confessing and receiving forgiveness for our sin. Face your filth honestly and be done with it!
Stop Laughing At Sin. The ninth action step is so closely related to the former three, I almost didn’t separate it. But I think we need to because there are some folks today who not only ignore their sin, they laugh at it. They pride themselves on a laughter and joyousness that is completely undeserved – dangerously undeserved. Instead of humbly admitting the cancers growing on their soul and getting treatment for them, they deny they even exist. They laugh until their disease consumes them – until they cannot laugh any more. James begs us not to do that. As God once cried through the voice of an ancient prophet, “Stop treating the wounds of my people as though they are not serious!” There is nothing funny about our fatal failures.
Why do you suppose it is that fully four of the ten action steps James includes in this exalted passage concern our too cavalier, laughing attitudes toward sin? Almost half the verbs in these verses, half the action steps on our path to exaltation, are concerned with getting us to take our sinfulness more seriously. Do you think God is trying to make a point here?
Humble Yourself. The tenth and final action step sort of brings us back to the beginning. Courageously submit, resist the devil, come near to God, wash your hands, purify your hearts, mourn the sins you discover in your life, stop playing games with sin – humble yourself completely before God and, I promise you as surely as I’m standing before you, He will lift you up. He will lift you up in this life and even more gloriously in the next. He will turn your mourning into dancing! He will turn your sorrow into joy! Those who learn, love and actively embrace this downward path will fully and finally discover the upward door!
This is not just happy talk – this is our spiritual reality as followers of Jesus. This is the action we signed up for. This is what it means to be fully and properly enlisted. Don’t settle for anything less than this. Don’t pretend things are better than they are or they will never be better than they are. Your Heavenly Father loves you like crazy. Give Him the chance to show you what your life could become. May the fully and properly enlisted arise and be exalted in this place!
Amen.
